Many – perhaps most — commentators on Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo are thoroughly missing the point. The most interesting part of Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo isn’t the horse-race retrospective “How did they screw up so much as to need each other?” It’s not the incipient bidding war for Yahoo. And it’s certainly not the antitrust implications.

The Microsoft/Yahoo combination could revolutionize the Internet. I’m serious. The opportunities for huge synergies might just be enough to blast the merged companies out of their current uncreative, Innovator’s Dilemma funks. Search is open for radical transformation in user interface, universal search relevancy, Web/enterprise integration, and just about everything to do with advertising and monetization. Email stands to be utterly reinvented. Portals and business intelligence have only scratched the surface of their potential. And social networking is of course in its infancy.

Here’s an overview of where some synergies and opportunities for a combined Microsoft/Yahoo lie. Read more

OK. I have a vision of one way search could evolve, which I think deserves consideration on at least a “concept-car” basis. This is all speculative; I haven’t discussed it at length with the vendors who’d need to make it happen, nor checked the technical assumptions carefully myself. So I could well be wrong. Indeed, I’ve at least half-changed my mind multiple times this weekend, just in the drafting of this post. Oh yeah, I’m also mixing several subjects together here too. All-in-all, this is not my crispest post …

Anyhow, the core idea is that large enterprises spider and index a subset of the Web, and use that for most of their employees’ web search needs. Key benefits would include:

Filtering out spam hits. This is obviously important for search, and in some cases could help with public-web text mining as well. It should be OK to be more aggressive on spam-site filtering in an enterprise-specific index than it is in general web search.

Filtering out malicious/undesirable downloads of various sorts. I’m thinking mainly of malware/spyware here, but of course it can also be used for netnannying porn-prevention and the like as well. Again, this is more easily done for the enterprise market than for the search world at large. (I anyway think that Google could blow Websense out of the water any time they wanted to – except, of course, for the not-so-small matter of not being seen as participating in the censorship business — but that’s a separate discussion.)

Capturing employees’ search strings. This could be useful for various purposes, including discerning their interests, and building the corporate ontology for internal web search.

Freshness control. If there’s a site you really care about, you can make sure it’s re-indexed frequently.